Learning My First Mac

Right away I downloaded VLC Player as an all-in-one video player to replace Quicktime. However, this weekend I was trying to play XVID compressed files and VLC Player couldn't really get the job done. Video played, but very often it froze for a bit and even crashed a few times. Enter Perian, a codec you can install to bring a diverse set of codec support to Apple's native Quicktime player. Perian calls itself the "swiss-army knife of Quicktime components", and it worked as advertised. Now I can play XVID compressed videos right on Quicktime; its not perfect, but it's performing much better than VLC.